Pick a Card...
by Pegasus
Summary: A 'what-if' take on the Marrow/Gambit relationship. What if she blew the whistle on his double-dealing instead of the trial?


Untitled Document 

DISCLAIMER: The characters in this story belong to Marvel. No infringement intended, blah,blah,blah. Please, please, please do not reproduce this story in part or in whole anywhere without at least asking me first! Thank you... 

email me at Sarah.Watkins@onyx.net

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**Pick a Card...**

_A 'what-if' story slightly bending events surrounding Remy LeBeau and Marrow. Please suspend your belief for a few minutes and presume that the Trial never took place, and Marrow showed up one day to confront Remy. What would have become of the Ragin' Cajun? My take on events._

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"Pick a card, any card."

Sarah heard the voice before she saw the face, and as always, it made her heart contract with grief and pity. She kept the hood pulled up over her face as she walked the riverside path, effectively camouflaging her mutation from all who passed. But the street magician knew her. Oh, yes. He knew her.

"Sarah" His voice was full of gladness. How dare he? He should hate the very sight of her, not greet her like a long-lost friend.

Remy LeBeau was a broken man, a man skirting the fine line between the real world and insanity. It was only his sleight-of-hand and natural reserves of charm and cunning that had kept him alive this long. 

You deserve it, LeBeau, Sarah told herself fiercely. You deserve all you get.

Why, then, did she feel so desperately sorry for him? Look at him. Only in his thirties, but already looking like a man of seventy. Bent over with the weight of his guilt, broken by the consequence of his actions - yes, he deserved it, she thought, grimly. He was dirty, thin, undernourishedand quite clearly insane.

"Chere - is good t'see you, non?" A fleeting semblance of sanity flashed across his once-handsome face.

"I'm not stopping, Remy. I" What HAD she just? What was the unmistakable pull that brought her back here, day after day? That had brought her to this seedy part of town every day, regularly, for the past six months? Was it arrogance and self indulgence in the downfall of the one-time X-Man? Was it her own need for mutant company? Or was it that she genuinely cared about what happened to him?

She drew the hooded cloak she wore firmly around her. As well as effectively covering her distorted features, it was a psychological shield between her and this frightening creature.  
  
_Because of me, he is here, she thought. Because of me, the X-Men are no more, the world is a very bad place in which to be a mutant. Because of me. Me._

The thought was not a pleasant one.

He had reached her now, and stood, looking up into her eyes. At one time they had matched height, but he was now endowed with a perpetual stoop that made him seem much shorter. At first Sarah had enjoyed the feeling of superiority her extra inches had made, but now it made her uncomfortable.

"What you bring Remy t'day?" His voice was eager, desperate and she hated him.

But she needed him.

The paradox was agony.

Digging in the pockets of her long coat, she brought out a wrapped pack of sandwiches, which she wordlessly handed to the man, who snatched them out of her hands and had eaten more than half before he mumbled a thank you through a mouthful of crumbs.

_Don't mention it,_ she thought, bitterly, watching him wolf down the food, then look up expectantly at her through dark-rimmed red-on-black eyes.

"Nothing else," she said, shortly. "I'llsee you, Remy."

"Don' go, cheres'il vous plaitpour moi, stay a li'l longer?"

"I have to." She pulled her arm away from his touch. She could feel his burning fever even through the thickness of the coat. Oh, yes. Remy LeBeau's days on the planet were numbered. The disease was eating him away from the inside. 

_He deserves all he gets_, she reminded herself again, fiercely, gently, but firmly moving his hand away from her arm. "I'll be back tomorrow," she said, automatically. She ignored the desperation in his eyes, ignored the words she knew would follow.

"Remy won' be alive t'morrow, chere. S'too late f'r me"

And with that, the drop out who had once been one of the most powerful mutants in Charles Xavier's team shuffled back under the bridge that he now called 'home', muttering all the while.

***

She _had_ ruined his life, that was true. But she had been justified. Hadn't she? As Marrow walked back towards her own lodgings, a humble, rat-infested pit in a cheap rooming house, she thought back to the day that had seen the beginning of the end of Remy LeBeau's career. The day she had arrived at Charles Xavier's mansion, hell-bent on revenge, demanding the truth from the man she had finally tracked down.

He had denied everything, of course he had. But although she had only been a very young child at the time, she had never forgotten those burning red-on-black eyes. Devil eyes. Even she, with her physically apparent mutation had been afraid of him. Even when she had realised that he hadn't intended to kill her, she had been afraid. But she had been left bitter, angry, unforgiving.

She had hurled accusation after accusation at the Cajun, who had finally buckled under the onslaught, confessing all in front of his fellow X-Men. Yes, he had rounded up the Marauders. Yes, he _had_ left it too late to save the Morlocks. He had turned to Sarah, a plea on his face. He had saved her, hadn't he? Hadn't he?

She had hardened her heart against his one shot at redemption and refused to answer, turning away from the man who had been responsible for the extermination of her people, her family. 

One by one, Remy's friends had turned away from him. He had gone against everything they held dear. He had worked for a sworn enemy. He had turned against his own kind. But worst of all, he had not told them the truth. And it was that poison that festered in the open wound of betrayal, destroying everything.

Knowing where he was no longer wanted, Remy returned first to his home in New Orleans. But he had been gone too long. Le Diable Blanc was no longer welcome amongst the people with whom he had grown up.

***

_"I'm frightened."_

_"Hey, c'mon, don' be frightened, p'tite. Remy gon' make sure you OK, oui?" The tall man wrapped his arms around her in a hug of compassion. "Listen t'me. Remy gotta go back in dere - see if dere's anyt'in' else he c'n do t'help. But 'fore datlemmee jus' show you dis trick. Make you smile."_

_He fished in his pocket and came out with a pack of cards, which he fanned out and grinned at her._

_"Pick a card. Any card."_

_And she knew she would live. _

***

He'd never come back for her. She'd sat and waited for the strange man with the burning eyes, but he'd never come back. He'd abandoned her to die. She'd only been a child and hadn't understood the full horror of what had taken place in the tunnels that night.

All she knew that she had been left.

The years had passed in a blur for her. The day she arrived at the steps of Charles Xavier's Mansion was one of bitter triumph and guilt-ridden satisfaction. Seeing how the X-Men turned from Gambit one after another did nothing but drive more nails into her coffin of guilt.

She could have dealt with the guilt had things stopped there.

But they hadn't.

Her revelations spread through the X-Men like poison. Slow, subtle and unseen, each individual gradually became suspicious of the others until there was nothing Charles Xavier could do to prevent his carefully constructed team of mutants from falling apart. One by one they left, no longer trusting in a world where mutant betrayed mutant, and one by one they disappeared totally.

Only Sarah had stayed at the mansion with the aging Professor, whose grief at the situation killed him a few months later.

***

_"Pick a card, chere petite?"_

She'd found him plying his trade on the streets of Brooklyn five years later. She'd heard the rumours of the mutant madman with the burning eyes and had known immediately the ghosts of her past had come to destroy her future. 

Then she slowly realised she had no future, not without the X-Men. Not withRemy LeBeau.

Since that day, six months ago, the sight of the Cajun's descent into a squalid, diseased state of madness had left her broken inside. For the first time she began to understand just what he must have gone through that night in the Morlock Tunnels. How he had stood by in horror at the needless waste of life - mutant or not. How he had tried desperately to do what he could.

The tears, when they came, washed the surface guilt from the reserves that were the fodder of hatred directed towards this man.

Finally, she knew what she had to do. Her teeth gritted against the turmoil raging in her soul, three days later she headed back to the Cajun's home.

***

"Where's LeBeau?"

He was not in his customary spot.

"Ya mean the Cajun Crackpot? Ah, they fished his headless corpse outta the Hudson two days ago." The drunkard laughed nastily. "Guess he couldn't swim without that stupid mouth of his ter keep him afloat, eh?"

He laughed nastily.

Sarah physically repelled from the man's words.

_Fished his headless corpse_

Remy LeBeau, the mutant known as Gambit was dead.

It was a hollow victory for Marrow. All those years she had wished him dead and now he was. Gone. With no final chance to redeem his memory.

Before she had been able to tell him she finally understood and to ask for his forgiveness.

Now the guilt was all hers to bear.

Tears leaking from her eyes, the young mutant walked slowly away, under the bridge where he had once lived. Catching sight of something poking out from under a filthy bedroll, she stooped to pick it up.

The Ace of Spades.

***

_"Was your card th' Ace o' Spades?"_

_"It was! It was!" The mutant child had clapped her hands in delight. "Do it again, mister!"_

_"Chere, Remy can't do it right now - dere's people in dere waitin' f'r his help, y'understand?"_

_"Oh."_

_"I promise ya. Will do th' trick again f'r you someday. Trust me."_

***

Sarah grieved for Remy LeBeau. She grieved for the passing of the only man who had ever done anything good for her and who she had rejected, turned against, and ultimately destroyed. As she stood, alone by the river, made black and bottomless by the moonless night, her reflection distorted and blurred by the tears that flooded from her eyes, she stared at the single playing card in her hand.

There was nothing worth staying in the world for, she reasoned. There was only her.

She could not live that way.

Closing her eyes, she prepared to take the final step that would send her to her doom at the bottom of the river.

"Waste of a beautiful girl, chere," came a quiet voice from behind her.

She spun around, almost losing her balance on the riverbank and stared at the emaciated figure standing on the path behind her.

"Remy?"

"Oui. C'est moi. You gon' go f'r a swim? Y'do better tryin' t'walk in dat polluted mess."

He still looked ill - desperately ill - but the spark of lunacy had gone from his red-on-black eyes. The former intelligence and wit was back.

"I got t'thinkin'," he said, unprompted. "Jus' why it was y'came back t'see me every day, when y'had every right t'jus' let me fade away." She opened her mouth to interject, but he waved down her words. "Non, non, chere, let Remy finish."

He took a painful breath and steadied himself against a bench. "I figured dat since we the only two mutants anywhere near here, we gon' need each other - at least f'r now."

"But the body"

"Some random crime victim wearin' m'coat." For the first time, Sarah noticed that he was half-clothed and shivering with the cold. "Thought if people b'lieved Remy LeBeau was gone, he'd stand a better chance of startin' over. But"

He paused as Sarah took off her coat and put it round his shoulders and looked at her, helplessly.

As she began to gently lead him away, she spoke in an offhand manner. "There was a time, Remy LeBeau, when I sat in the cover of a burnt-out building, waiting for you to come back to fetch me. Now I realise what it was I did wrong."

They walked through the stillness of the night, the two mutants distanced and brought together by the passage of the years, each needing the other as a justification to survive. And Sarah did know what had been wrong all those years.

"What I should have done was come to find you. WellI have now, and somehowwe'll make things right."

There was a rustle as the Cajun turned his head to scrutinise her carefully in the darkness. Then there was a glint of white as he smiled and he felt in the pockets of her coat, holding up the Ace of Spades towards her.

"Any card, chere."  


(c) S.Watkins, 2001


End file.
